R SIG Debian - May 2013 - Upcoming repository for R 3.0 on wheezy

Dear all,

I have done the backport of R 3.0 to wheezy in the usual way and it is on its 
way to CRAN.

If you are interested in installing it, be aware that the debianized R 
packages availabe in wheezy that are not in the list of packages recompiled 
for CRAN will not work with this backport. This is explained in more detail in 
the README, which will appear in an updated version together with the 
wheezycran3 repository folder.

http://cran.r-project.org/bin/linux/debian/

I realize that it is not optimal to just support only such a small proportion 
of the R related packages in Debian.

To move forward, I see two options:

a) One or more Debian developers could start to upload r-base and the reverse 
dependencies to the official Debian wheezy-backports repository. For wheezy, 
this is pretty straightforward at first as no adaptations are currently 
necessary to make the packages from testing (I am actually backporting from 
unstable) build on wheezy. But one needs to be a debian developer to upload 
and commit to the job of keeping these backports working.

b) Alternatively the build scripts I am using could be improved or rewritten. 
It seems sbuild is recommended over pbuilder nowadays, and there are several 
points that could be improved to make the backporting procedure more efficient.

Of course it would be nice to have more (like cran2deb repositories for more R 
packages), but for me a) or b) should happen first. For now I have to go back 
to other tasks.

Greetings to all,

Johannes